Read Against Infinity for Free Online

there’ll be any slippage?” the old man asked.
    “Fracture fault lines fan out to the north. Don’t look like any on this side.”
    “Satellites can’t see everything.”
    “Sí. You go with Manuel, eh? Up that cañon. Keep him from blowing his leg off and bringing down a slide on himself.”
    “Sure.”
    The two took Slicky with them and headed up the ravine. A small stream tinkled and chimed, echoing from the ice-crusted walls. Rosy ammonia vapor steamed from it. The boy sloughed along, thinking of the crushed steel plate of Short Stuff and of the high keening cries the animals had made before. Melting snow and ice fed the stream and squished under his boots. The man spoke to Slicky and let it romp a bit and then spoke again, and it stopped moving and quivering so much, and fell into step at their heels, the yellow ceramic sliding and clicking now and then as it leaped over a streamlet but otherwise without noise, patient and eager both. Blocks of shagged-off rock had tumbled into the ravine, and now, as they went on, slabs of ice covered the floor, shortening the ravine until it was a trough. Old Matt kept studying the steep snowdrifts and rock walls. He paused, puffing, and said, “Quiet from now on.”
    “You think…?”
    “There will be nothing, not even rockjaws, this high. Anything that moves means something, here.”
    Manuel nodded. He stamped his feet to warm them. Old Matt popped a vent in his own suit and said, “Take care of this now.”
    Urine jetted out and spattered on rock. Manuel did the same. He thought it was to save distraction later, but in the stillness of the cañon the crackling and sputtering of the urine as it froze boomed in his ears, and he saw it was to avoid noise at the wrong time.
    He asked, “What about suit sound?”
    “Nothing for it. Reverse osmosis is as quiet as you can get. Only thing we could do would be turn off the warmer, and this high your lungs would freeze solid in half an hour.”
    Manuel nodded. They went on, walking now rather than loping, to keep down the clatter of rocks beneath their boots. Every few minutes his suit would exhale excess carbon dioxide it could not handle and the gas puff would snap loudly as it froze and fell to the ground. Otherwise a strange silence descended over the boy and he heard only his own breathing. His external micromikes did not pick up even a murmur of a breeze; the atmosphere was too thin here to carry enough. He toted on his back a new gun, given him by his father this morning: a double-bore fan laser, used for engineering back at Sidon. He had fired it only once, at a boulder, to learn the recoil and that it pulled to the left a little, as the Colonel had said.
    They went two klicks, until the ravine gave out at a tilted sheet of ice, studded with red-gray rock. Old Matt said, “No point going more. Here’s where we separate.”
    “How come? Won’t we be safer if we stick—”
    “There’s no safe or not safe to this. It’ll run down two just as easy as one. You go over near that gorge, where the ice turns purple. Keep your back to the gorge. Not likely it’d come at you from that way. It’d have to come out of the gorge itself, and why should it go to that trouble when there’s softer stuff up here?”
    “All right.” The boy hefted the double-bore.
    “I’ll be a few hundred meters upslope. That way we get two angles on it, probably.”
    “And if one of us gets hurt, the other likely won’t.”
    “Yeah.” The old man peered at him, bunked with the copper eye, and smiled. “Turn off the short-range, too. Sometimes the Aleph, it gives off a lot of electromagnetic stuff. Just noise, the scientists said. I dunno. It’ll overload your set, though.”
    “Okay.”
    “And stay still.”
    “And Slicky?”
    “He’s a porpoise. Wrong instincts for this, never mind what they say about IQ-boosting making them the same.”
    “He can distract it.”
    “I kind of think that’s what we’re all doing, distracting